16 May, 2009

Sparrow King Backtracks-A First!

Don writes the following...

"Now here's something that we haven't seen before. Sparrow King has evidently backtracked over 200 km in the past 2 days, and is now south of Winnipeg again. I triple-checked the data to make certain there's no error. Although only one or two of the best quality points are shown on the maps each day, there are a total of 9 location fixes of varying quality all in the same general northernmost location on the 13th (between Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipeg), and 7 total fixes clustered together farther south on the 15th. I'm convinced this has actually happened."

This is something that we were all wondering about. Mark Prostor has been working on an amazing page that allows us to see the extent of the ice in Canada in real time. Sparrow King was flying directly into it two days ago.

It appears that Sparky has assessed the situation and returned to warmer conditions, no doubt with a higher abundance of food available.

He was in an agricultural area on the outskirts of Winnipeg at last signal.

Do we have any readers from the Winnipeg area who would like to describe the current climatic conditions/birdlife at this time?

Long-distance migrants

In February 2007, an FRG team is traveling to Chile to radio-tag several adult female tundra peregrines. We'll record their travels here, following their migration north to the arctic and then back to Chile next year.